dantesinfernofandomcom-20200214-history
Ice Giants
Ice Giants are massive, humanoid creatures found in Treachery, the Ninth Circle in Hell. They appeared in the area before Cocytus where Lucifer was imprisoned. ''Dante's Inferno'' For waging wars against Heaven and ravaging the Earth in the distant past, the Giants are confined to the icy walls surrounding Cocytus, unable to move, though capable of seeing and breathing. In the game, the Giants tried to hinder Dante's progress toward Lucifer by blowing their icy breath toward him. Being exposed to their breath would cause damage and/or knock Dante to his death. Animated Epic They are not fully seen in the game, but they are seen in the Animated Epic in a brief cameo appearance. In the cameo, they appeared as giant (though their exact depiction of their size was not clear, mainly because it was never shown about Dante encountering them directly), bony creatures with skeletons formed of jagged ice with sharp edges pointing out to signify their limbs. They had a head and a face which expressed an evil expression with downward-pointing diagonal directed eye-spots and a sinister smile which both lit up neon bluish-green in the dark. Trivia * In "Inferno," Virgil mentioned that the Giants outside the Circle of Treachery consisted of Nimrod, Ephialtes, Antaeus, Briareus, Tityos and Typhon. Unlike their game and movie counterparts, the Giants are not hostile and lowered the two travelers down into Cocytus to conclude Dante's journey through Hell. * In Greek myth, the Giants (Gigantes) are a race of creatures who sprung from the Earth as a final challenge to the Olympian gods for control of the world. They stormed Mount Olympus but were defeated and destroyed by the gods, who sentenced them to Tartarus (a mythological equivalent to Hell). * Ice Giants or Frost Giants are an actual race of creatures in Norse mythology. Known as hrimthurs or Rime Giants, they are the children of the primordial giant Ymir, who was murdered by the chief god, Odin. Due to Ymir being born from ice infected with a poisonous scum-like substance, almost all of his Frost Giant descendants are tainted by evil. All giants in Norse myth are the archenemies of the Aesir, the Norse gods, and are destined to kill them during the Apocalypse. The Frost Giants had their home in the realm of Niflheim, an icy region which bordered the Norse underworld, Hel. * Although never explicitly stated the Giants might be synonymous with the Biblical Nephilim: the enormous offspring of humans and the angelic Watchers of Heaven. Against God's will, these 200 angels descended to Earth and took human women as wives, additionally teaching mankind forbidden arts. Their unholy children grew to alarming size and devoured everything that they could lay their hands on, including people. As a penalty for this act, the Watchers were captured and imprisoned for eternity in hellish domains, and the corrupt humans and Nephilim were drowned in the Great Flood, of which only the patriarch Noah and his family survived. * Among the Giants named in the Inferno, Nimrod was actually neither a Biblical giant or one from Greco-Roman myth. He was infamous for building the Tower of Babel, an affront to God. * Briareus, also known as Aegaeon, was one of the Hekatonkheires (the Hundred-Handed Ones), the siblings of the Titans and the uncles of the Olympian gods. They were imprisoned by their father, Ouranos, in the Underworld because he thought they were too ugly to be seen. The Hekatonkheires were later freed by their nephew Zeus and fought with him during the Titanomachy. After this war, they are stationed at the gates of Tartarus as guards of the Damned. * Tityos was the giant son of Zeus in Greek mythology. He was so enormous that his mother was split apart when he was born. Tityos was later commissioned by Zeus's wife Hera to chase and assault the Titaness Leto, with whom Zeus had an affair and gotten pregnant. Leto was able to find shelter and bore twins: the gods Artemis and Apollo. Not even days old, the twin gods then sought out their mother's assailant and slew Tityos with their arrows. His soul was sentenced to Tartarus, where he was tortured by having his body constantly clawed by vultures. * Typhon in Greek myth was not a giant nor a titan but a monstrous serpentine monster: an immortal child of Gaia, the Earth. When Zeus defeated the Titans and imprisoned them in the underworld, Gaia gave birth to Typhon as a challenge to Zeus's authority over the universe. Typhon nearly succeeded in destroying the king of the Olympian gods by ripping out his sinews. However, Zeus was rescued by the nymph Styx and was able to fight Typhon once more, driving the monster underneath a mountain and trapping the creature there. He was said to be the cause of volcanic eruptions on Earth, particularly [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Etna Mount Etna] in Italy. Before his imprisonment, Typhon had several more monstrous offspring by the nymph Echidna, who continued to terrorize the country. One of these children was Cerberus. Category:Creatures